This piece is a rather personal one, and something that I’d been thinking about since late January. My first trip to Wuhan in 2010 was to attend my first-ever ultimate frisbee tournament in China, and it quite literally changed my entire outlook on the country and set me on a different course. For that, I can never thank the city or the people of Wuhan enough.
This year it was really painful to watch that city become synonymous with a virus for so many people, and I just wanted to write down and share my own memories of the place. I think the experiences I wrote about tend to mirror the whole roller coaster of emotions that often come with moving to a new country where you don’t speak the language. Hopefully, it resonates.
I wrote the piece in Chinese, but if you’re not a Chinese reader then Google Translate does a pretty good job. (If you use Chrome, I believe there’s a simple button at the top that will translate the page as well.) That of course comes with all the pitfalls and awkwardness of literal translation, but you can follow the narrative – and hey, it’s got pictures from back then too!